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Wii U

Pretty early into my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I decided it was the best video game that has ever been created so far. That’s an awfully lofty statement to make, I know. But since game journalism is practically exploding with 10/10 reviews already, it would be redundant of me to write another one. So instead, I would like to approach writing about this game from a different angle, much as I did with Metal Gear Solid V. I want to speak generally about the aspects of this game that, in my mind, succeed spectacularly–and I also want to talk about the aspects that could have been handled better, because even the best game ain’t perfect.

When it was first announced that Nintendo and Atlus were collaborating to create a game that crosses Fire Emblem with Shin Megami Tensei, absolutely no one in the universe was expecting Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE to be the final result. It takes the standard Persona formula of high schoolers dungeon-crawling, but it throws out the series’s dark tone in favor of an overtly energetic and colorful J-pop backdrop. You play as teenagers who need to balance their obligation of protecting modern-day Tokyo with maintaining their careers as budding idols. As Polygon’s Janine Hawkins points out, the whole game ends up feeling like a Sailor Moon spinoff. Well, as a lover of both JRPGs and Sailor Moon, suffice to say I was pleasantly surprised. Read more

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game about turning your brain off and indulging in a 90-hour power fantasy. To try to claim much more about the game than that would probably be overreaching. It takes everything about the design of its predecessor and says, “Let’s do that again, but bigger,” in the most literal possible sense. The only thing that didn’t survive the embiggening process was the previous game’s story execution. The ultimate result is an absolutely massive game where you as the player are largely left to your own devices, for better and for worse. Read more